Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric, and this is next question.
Speaker 2: I got a smartphone when I was twelve years old.
Speaker 3: I was in fifth grade.
Speaker 1: It was my mom's old phone, so I think I
Speaker 1: was like nine or.
Speaker 4: Ten, I was fourteen.
Speaker 2: As far as like comparing myself to other people, I
Speaker 2: think I started doing that a lot more when d
Speaker 2: a smartphone and like seeing people are posting.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, it's kind of like a constant competition. You make
Speaker 4: posts to show people what you're doing, and whether or
Speaker 4: not you want to admit it, it's to show that you're
Speaker 4: doing something better than the other person. I think a
Speaker 4: lot of it is toxic and it has contributed to
Speaker 4: like a lot of negativity.
Speaker 2: I cannot wait to hopefully one day get better control
Speaker 2: over my life, because right now, Instagram and TikTok and
Speaker 2: snapchatre'srolling my life like puppeteers.
Speaker 1: Do you guys remember that song from Bye Bye Bertie,
Speaker 1: the one Paul Lynn sang back in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 3: Why Kevin May like we were perfect in every way?
Speaker 3: What's the matter with kids today?
Speaker 1: But go sixty one years later people are wondering the
Speaker 1: same thing, what's the matter with kids today? I am
Speaker 1: so excited to have one of my favorite people, Jonathan Height,
Speaker 1: here to help us think through what exactly has gone
Speaker 1: wrong with young people iPhones and social media and what
Speaker 1: we can all do about it together. As you'll hear,
Speaker 1: the solution might be simple, but it is not easy.
Speaker 1: Jonathan has a new book out and it is doing gangbusters.
Speaker 1: Clearly he's struck a nerve. It's a deep dive into
Speaker 1: how and why and when smartphones changed everything about childhood
Speaker 1: and why we might just be at a tipping point
Speaker 1: where parents and kids say no Moss. Jonathan Height. Your
Speaker 1: new book is called The Anxious Generation, How the great
Speaker 1: rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
Speaker 1: I'm so happy to see you and talk to you.
Speaker 1: We have been actually communicating during your whole writing process,
Speaker 1: and yeah, you sneak a few graphs to me kind
Speaker 1: of showing what you were discovering. But before we talk
Speaker 1: about the essence of this book, you had great hopes
Speaker 1: for technology when it first surfaced in our lives and
Speaker 1: in society writ large. What did you think it would
Speaker 1: allow us to do well?
Speaker 3: I was very influenced by a book I read. It
Speaker 3: was written in nineteen ninety nine by Robert Wright called
Speaker 3: non Zero, and it was how he starts with the
Speaker 3: history of bacteria and like early life, and whenever life
Speaker 3: has found a way to cooperate more, you get an
Speaker 3: explosion of productivity and you never lose it. And so
Speaker 3: life has been stepping up ability to cooperate at larger
Speaker 3: and larger levels forever. And with humans, you know, we
Speaker 3: were originally hunter gatherers and tribes battling each other. But
Speaker 3: when you get forms of political organization that you have
Speaker 3: communities or towns, you get roads that link. So it's
Speaker 3: always connection has always been good in the long run.
Speaker 3: Sometimes there's chaos at first, but it's always good in
Speaker 3: the long run. And remember this book comes out, it's
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety nine, so you and I remember the nineties.
Speaker 3: It was like, yay, history is over all that crazy
Speaker 3: stuff with dictators and wars, like that's all God and
Speaker 3: like it's going to be yeah and that. So then
Speaker 3: the Internet comes in around I saw my first web
Speaker 3: browser nineteen ninety four, and it really was like, wow,
Speaker 3: you know, these guys in California, they're giving us godlike powers.
Speaker 3: They are literally giving us omnissions. I can at this moment,
Speaker 3: I can know anything in the whole. It was a
Speaker 3: amazing you know, and I was I was a relatively
Speaker 3: young man at the time, and I loved computers and technology.
Speaker 3: I'd worked in computers, so there was enormous techno optimism.
Speaker 3: I certainly was a techno optimist. And this persists all
Speaker 3: the way through about twenty eleven twenty twelve, for sure,
Speaker 3: because now we're getting the iPhone, which is magical and amazing.
Speaker 3: We're getting you know, uber like I just press a
Speaker 3: button and a taxi appears for me.
Speaker 1: Why didn't I think of that?
Speaker 3: So, you know, it was just amazement after amazement, and
Speaker 3: there was a lot of gratitude, and we treated these
Speaker 3: guys like gods.
Speaker 1: I know that you had your son at the time,
Speaker 1: I believe was two years old, and you started showing
Speaker 1: him this technology and you marveled at the fact that
Speaker 1: he was able to do the touch screen and swipe
Speaker 1: almost instinctively right, and you thought, Wow, this is so cool.
Speaker 3: That's exactly.
Speaker 1: Was there not a part of you, John that was saying, no,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not cool.
Speaker 3: No, because you know, it's not that I showed it
Speaker 3: to him. It's that, like every young human being. He
Speaker 3: saw the lights and flashing colors and said, you know,
Speaker 3: I phone, I phone. You know, he wanted he desperately
Speaker 3: wanted it, and you give it to him, and he
Speaker 3: very quickly, you know, learned you touch, you know, you
Speaker 3: touch what you want. You know, it's it's very intuitive technology.
Speaker 1: And what year was this when so little I.
Speaker 3: Got my first iPhone in two thousand and eight, was
Speaker 3: an iPhone two the year after it came out, and
Speaker 3: my son was two at the time, and he, you know,
Speaker 3: he could bear. He wasn't even really talking like he
Speaker 3: had words, he didn't have sentences yet, but he could
Speaker 3: figure out how to move around the iPhone and so
Speaker 3: that's amazing. There's no problem there. And you got to
Speaker 3: remember the original iPhone was just a digital Swiss army knife.
Speaker 3: It just you know, if you wanted maps, you had maps.
Speaker 3: If you want music, you got music. If you want
Speaker 3: a flashlight, you got a flashlight. There were no notifications,
Speaker 3: there was no app store, there was no social media.
Speaker 3: So it was a tool that I pulled out of
Speaker 3: my pocket when I wanted to do something, and so
Speaker 3: it was great. The story in my book is how
Speaker 3: everything changes between twenty ten and twenty fifteen. I call
Speaker 3: that the great rewiring of childhood because in twenty ten
Speaker 3: almost all American kids have a flip phone. They have
Speaker 3: everyone has a cell phone, but it was a dumb
Speaker 3: what we now call it dumb was then mostly a
Speaker 3: flip phone which they used to connect to other kids.
Speaker 3: And so that's great. Still, technology is wonderful, it's amazing.
Speaker 3: You know, the kids are going to be so smart.
Speaker 3: Oh by they're all techno whizzes. That's twenty ten. By
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen, eighty percent have a smartphone. They've got high
Speaker 3: speed data, which they high speed Internet. They didn't have
Speaker 3: it in twenty ten. Mostly they've got a front facing camera,
Speaker 3: which wasn't there in twenty ten. It was introduced in
Speaker 3: twenty ten. They have Instagram, which was introduced in twenty ten.
Speaker 3: And so the daily life of a young person in
Speaker 3: twenty ten was still recognizably a human childhood, where technology
Speaker 3: was a tool they used to connect. By twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: it was not recognizably a human childhood. It was spent
Speaker 3: most of the waking hours that were not in school.
Speaker 3: Oh actually, and even hours in school were spent looking
Speaker 3: at their small screen and doing stuff that disconnected them
Speaker 3: from the peace people next to them. So that's why
Speaker 3: I say childhood change between twenty ten and twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: and I believe that's the major reason that mental health
Speaker 3: plunged all over the developed world in that period.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the number of kids who when you
Speaker 1: say they, what ages are you talking about between twenty
Speaker 1: ten and twenty fifteen when these devices became ubiquitous.
Speaker 3: So the thing to focus on is puberty. Puberty begins
Speaker 3: around eleven to thirteen for girls is early puberty, and
Speaker 3: then boys it's a year or two later. And puberty
Speaker 3: is so important because that's when the human brain really
Speaker 3: speeds up its development. The brain isn't growing very much
Speaker 3: in total volume, that it reaches almost its full volume
Speaker 3: by age six. Everything else is about sorting through which
Speaker 3: which neurons are going to stay, which are going to
Speaker 3: get cleaned out, which synapses, which connections between neurons are
Speaker 3: going to stay and multiply, and which ones are going
Speaker 3: to disappear. So it's a tuning up process which is
Speaker 3: guided by the experiences that the child is having. So
Speaker 3: if a child is running around a lot and playing
Speaker 3: social games and gossiping and doing all the normal stuff
Speaker 3: of childhood, then those parts of the brain are going
Speaker 3: to wire up sort of in the way that evolution expected.
Speaker 3: But if a kid is spending six hours a day
Speaker 3: on video games, that's a very different set of stimulation.
Speaker 3: It's going to lead to different neural development. Boys mostly
Speaker 3: went for video games, or they disproportionally went for video
Speaker 3: games and pornography. Girls disproportionately went for social media and
Speaker 3: social media. It just like it's like, you take all
Speaker 3: the complicated social development. I mean, you know, you know,
Speaker 3: as a boy, I remember seventh grade was the worst
Speaker 3: year of my life. According to what I read, that
Speaker 3: is the peak year of bullying, especially for girls. So
Speaker 3: I was very aware even then. You know, girls had
Speaker 3: it even rougher, Like it's hard to be a middle
Speaker 3: school girl. And social media homes hones in on exactly
Speaker 3: the insecurities, the fears, the relational aggression, and it gives
Speaker 3: girls tools to say, oh, you know, you want to
Speaker 3: hurt her relationships or her reputation, here you go. You
Speaker 3: can do it anonymously, you can do it over the week.
Speaker 3: And oh she's insecure about her looks, let's show her
Speaker 3: lots of photos of other girls who have happier lives
Speaker 3: and more beautiful faces than she does. So for all
Speaker 3: these reasons, social media really hit girls hard. Oh but
Speaker 3: your original question was like what ag just sorry this
Speaker 3: is att answer. That's OK, because I'm so focused on
Speaker 3: puberty in middle school because that's where the maximum damage
Speaker 3: is done and that's what it's going to be easiest
Speaker 3: for us to rip it all out.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about this whole synapse wiring and your brain
Speaker 1: kind of making these connections during puberty. How much of
Speaker 1: those connections are really impacting your emotional wellbeing versus, say,
Speaker 1: your cognitive function.
Speaker 3: That's a great question because that difference is one that
Speaker 3: we know Meta was very aware of. That is some
Speaker 3: documents leaked brought up by Francis Haugen the Whistleblower show
Speaker 3: a some sort of a workshop or something that Facebook
Speaker 3: that had internal workshop where someone was explaining to Facebook
Speaker 3: staff worldwide what happens during puberty, and they explicitly say
Speaker 3: that the brain rewires itself from back to front and
Speaker 3: during puberty first the emotions. The emotions get rewired and
Speaker 3: the emotional life is very strong, and the prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 3: which is the seat of executive function, the seat of
Speaker 3: self control, the seat of I'm going to make a plan.
Speaker 3: Here's how I get to the plan. I'm going to
Speaker 3: stick to the plan. That stuff which is even it's
Speaker 3: hard for us adults in the age of social.
Speaker 1: Media to say, and I understand that that continues to
Speaker 1: develop up until like age twenty four.
Speaker 3: Twenty that's right, Yeah, that's right. So this rewiring of
Speaker 3: the brain, and part of what happens is you get
Speaker 3: the neurons get coated in a sheath of myelin, which
Speaker 3: is kind of a fatty substance. So that's that's when
Speaker 3: we say things get locked down. It's sort of like,
Speaker 3: you know, when you're the young brain could change in
Speaker 3: a lot of ways, but once it's figured out like, okay,
Speaker 3: this is what is needed in this culture, let's put
Speaker 3: the milin sheath over it, so that now things go
Speaker 3: really fast, but they can't be changed anymore. So puberty
Speaker 3: is the period when the brain is assuming this form,
Speaker 3: and the last part to wire up like that is
Speaker 3: the prefunctional cortex. And so we don't know, you know,
Speaker 3: we don't know whether these effects will be permanent. But
Speaker 3: if kids are growing up without spending ten minutes at
Speaker 3: a time on tasks. If it's if it's constant switching,
Speaker 3: constant switching of tasks that's going to interfere with the
Speaker 3: ability to develop executive control and to make plans and
Speaker 3: execute them.
Speaker 1: We'll talk a little bit more if you could, John
Speaker 1: about how this constant focus on your phone impact your
Speaker 1: ability to form, you know, to be able to make
Speaker 1: judgments to get versus say, being out in the world
Speaker 1: playing tag, as you said, or running around with your
Speaker 1: friends or having face to face interactions. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little more about that.
Speaker 3: Sure, So let's start. You know, I'm going to assume
Speaker 3: that most of your listeners are are not gen Z,
Speaker 3: that they're older, that many many of them have had
Speaker 3: to say that I'm kidding just because gen Z is no,
Speaker 3: I shouldn't say anything I should saying about whether they're
Speaker 3: likely what they're likely listen to it. But you know,
Speaker 3: most of us remember childhood, back when we were allowed out.
Speaker 3: And that's the other piece of this, which I'm sure
Speaker 3: we'll come back to.
Speaker 1: It's the lost the playbase, this culture of fear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, that it's kind of coincided with this interesting
Speaker 1: thing enough and helicopter parenting.
Speaker 3: It's all part of it. But so yeah, to lead
Speaker 3: up to it, we can say, remember your best moments
Speaker 3: of outdoor play, and probably your heart was beating fast.
Speaker 3: It was a running, a game involved running. It was
Speaker 3: incredibly exciting. Maybe it was hiding, maybe it was swinging,
Speaker 3: maybe there was motion, but there was probably something that
Speaker 3: was thrilling about it.
Speaker 1: For me, it was riding my bike all over my neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Oh and you remember steep hills. You go over the
Speaker 3: top of.
Speaker 1: My down and broke my front too, so that wasn't
Speaker 1: a positive experience. But other than that, I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: taking off on my bike in the early morning or
Speaker 1: mid morning and being gone until five thirty.
Speaker 3: That's right, That's the way childhood was. And when you know,
Speaker 3: I really remember like going on my bus, like up
Speaker 3: over a hill and there's a part where you're on
Speaker 3: the downhill and it's a steep hill and you're a
Speaker 3: little scared, but it's incredibly exciting and you're incredibly focused
Speaker 3: on what you're doing. And then when you do it,
Speaker 3: when you do it and you don't wipe out, you're like, yes,
Speaker 3: it's so exciting. While you were going down that hill.
Speaker 3: How many other things were you thinking about. Probably none, Right,
Speaker 3: You're totally focused on what you are, totally present, and
Speaker 3: kids have an incredible ability to be present to look
Speaker 3: at something you didn't even notice. Now, let's contrast that
Speaker 3: with sitting in school and you're trying to pay attention
Speaker 3: to the teacher. And let's suppose let's suppose imagine you're
Speaker 3: back in school and on your desk, you brought your
Speaker 3: television set in and your television is there. You you
Speaker 3: out the remote control. You can watch whatever you wants
Speaker 3: right on your desk, and your telephone is there and
Speaker 3: you can talk to whoever you want during class, and
Speaker 3: comic books are there, and pornography is there. Everything is
Speaker 3: spread out on your desk, and the teacher's droning on
Speaker 3: about map Like, you're probably not paying attention to the teacher,
Speaker 3: and you're probably scattered among all the other things. And
Speaker 3: that's basically what we've done to kids, because it's not
Speaker 3: just the phones, it's all the educatational technology.
Speaker 1: So what is that doing to your brain?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 1: If you are being assaulted by all these different things
Speaker 1: that are vying for your attention, is that just scrambling
Speaker 1: your brain? What is it doing exactly?
Speaker 3: Well, everything that involves learning is changing your brain. None
Speaker 3: of these are like big things like it. It's not
Speaker 3: like you could look at a brain and say, oh,
Speaker 3: this kid watch social media. But the neural growth is
Speaker 3: going to change in response to whatever it is that
Speaker 3: you do. So if you spend a lot of time
Speaker 3: doing archery, whatever parts of the brain are related to that,
Speaker 3: those are going to really refine that you become a
Speaker 3: really good archer. Or if it's athletics, whatever it is,
Speaker 3: those parts of the brain are going to tune up
Speaker 3: really really well. So if it's playing video games, then
Speaker 3: you're going to get really good at the hand eye coordination,
Speaker 3: not at risk taking, not at any physical skill, just
Speaker 3: whatever skills the video game gives you. What we can
Speaker 3: say about all the distraction for sure is this it
Speaker 3: is making kids dumber. And by dumber, I just mean
Speaker 3: when you give kids tests, as we do a lot,
Speaker 3: what we see is that from nineteen seventy through twenty
Speaker 3: twelve those scores were going up. We have in America,
Speaker 3: we have the National Assessment of Educational Progress Report. From
Speaker 3: the seventies to twenty twelve, those numbers were going up slowly.
Speaker 3: It's very hard to make a whole population smarter. But
Speaker 3: we actually did it. And then last year we found
Speaker 3: out scores have plummeted, and everyone said, oh, COVID, My god,
Speaker 3: COVID really, you know it did it in you know,
Speaker 3: the COVID the cancelations, And that was true. You know,
Speaker 3: keeping kids out of school was bad. You know, it's
Speaker 3: also bad. Putting them on screens all day long, that
Speaker 3: was really bad. But guess what a lot of the
Speaker 3: job was actually twenty twelve to twenty nineteen. It was
Speaker 3: before COVID, so American kids we lost almost all the project.
Speaker 3: Almost all the problems we've made since nineteen seventy one
Speaker 3: is now gone gone since twenty twelve. And it's not
Speaker 3: just us. There's an international data set called PISA, and
Speaker 3: it shows that around the world, almost all over the world.
Speaker 3: There's thirty seven countries, I think in pea thirty four
Speaker 3: something like that. It's not just us. All over kids
Speaker 3: are there, they know less, they're doing work on academic achievement,
Speaker 3: which has not happened before, I certainly on a global level,
Speaker 3: and they're lonelier in school. There's some questions like I
Speaker 3: feel lonely at school, you know, strongly agree disagree, and
Speaker 3: so Gene Twangy and I looked at those six items
Speaker 3: and we graft them out and all over the world
Speaker 3: beginning after twenty twelve, kids are lonely at school. Of
Speaker 3: course they are because if everyone else has a smartphone. Now,
Speaker 3: even if you don't have one, there's no one to
Speaker 3: talk to in the hall. Everyone's on their phone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, there's so much to unravel here. First,
Speaker 1: let's talk about sort of academic performance. I know increasingly
Speaker 1: schools are thinking about banning or forcing students to put
Speaker 1: away phones. They say ostensibly they have a no phone use,
Speaker 1: but they don't really necessarily enforce it. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I remember taking my daughter on a college tour and
Speaker 1: going to a class and seeing so many kids. Now
Speaker 1: this was when they were taking notes on computers. We're
Speaker 1: shopping at Ja Crew and other things, and Professor, I know,
Speaker 1: Larry Sabato, I think you cuts out.
Speaker 3: Connection.
Speaker 1: That's really so Larry, I think figured out he wasn't
Speaker 1: going to have Wi Fi in his classroom. So they
Speaker 1: could use their computer to take notes, but they couldn't shop,
Speaker 1: or they couldn't go on social media platforms.
Speaker 3: How about it work out?
Speaker 1: I think better, I think better for him. But it
Speaker 1: infuriated me. Actually, I thought, these parents are paying all
Speaker 1: this money and these kids are shopping at ja cru
Speaker 1: during a really important history class. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: this school thing. I mean, more and more schools are
Speaker 1: trying to enact these requirements or restrictions on phones. Right,
Speaker 1: how is that going over? And do you think it's
Speaker 1: going to turn around test scores?
Speaker 3: Yes, I think it's going to go really well. It's
Speaker 3: going to happen this year and so far. So let
Speaker 3: me just be clear about what has been happening. So
Speaker 3: the teachers all hate the phones. The teachers, the last
Speaker 3: thing they need is to be phone police. The teachers
Speaker 3: can see what it's doing. I've not yet made a
Speaker 3: teacher who thinks it's a good thing that the kids
Speaker 3: have phones in their pockets. The principles, the heads of school,
Speaker 3: they all hate the phones, the drama, the bullying, the
Speaker 3: thing that they can and even see what's going on.
Speaker 3: They just know that something terrible is happening with the students.
Speaker 3: They can't even help. So everyone hates the phones. Why
Speaker 3: don't they bam them? Why don't they require them to
Speaker 3: be locked away? Because in every school there are some
Speaker 3: parents who freak out and yell and scream and say, no,
Speaker 3: I have to be able to reach my child. What
Speaker 3: if there's an emergency or a schoolshroom. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: And so this small number of parents who insist that
Speaker 3: it's their right to communicate with their child even in
Speaker 3: class are very loud. They have a loud voice. So
Speaker 3: what they do. What the common policy in America is
Speaker 3: the school says you're not allowed to use your phone
Speaker 3: during class, that your phone use is banned during class.
Speaker 1: And that's a joke.
Speaker 3: It's a joke because what it means is open phone
Speaker 3: use is banned as long as you hide it in
Speaker 3: a book, hide it in your lap, or go to
Speaker 3: the bathroom. And teachers have told me kids are going
Speaker 3: to the bathroom a lot more nowadays. If they have
Speaker 3: a you know, if they can use their phone in
Speaker 3: the bathroom, they will. You know, if you were running
Speaker 3: a heroin treatment clinic and you had a rule, you
Speaker 3: come in, you know, we'll work on your heroin addiction.
Speaker 3: You can bring your heroin in, you can bring your
Speaker 3: needles in, but just leap in your pocket. Just don't
Speaker 3: shoot up while you're here. In the clinic like they
Speaker 3: can't do that. And so, to return to your example
Speaker 3: of Larry Sabato, or of teachers until three years ago,
Speaker 3: I always had the policy because I like to take
Speaker 3: notes on a computer. So I always had a policy.
Speaker 3: And I'm teaching NBA students at at NYU. These are
Speaker 3: like twenty eight year old professionals, and you know, you know,
Speaker 3: we're all mature here. So I would make a big
Speaker 3: show of saying, look, we can't multitask. Here's the research.
Speaker 3: You can't multitask. If you want to use your computer
Speaker 3: to take notes, you have to stand up, raise your
Speaker 3: right hand and pledge, and it's written out. I will
Speaker 3: only use my computer for class related activities. I will
Speaker 3: not go on the end, you know.
Speaker 1: So I think there's an honor system at NYA. They
Speaker 1: don't have that only UVA, that's.
Speaker 3: Right, which I tried to reform, but that's another story.
Speaker 3: When I was there, since I taught at UVA until
Speaker 3: twenty eleven, loved it, and so but what I found
Speaker 3: my TA would sit in the back and she would say,
Speaker 3: you know a third of the class, especially everyone in
Speaker 3: the back row, is their shopping. They're on social media,
Speaker 3: they're texting, and I finally realized this is happening all
Speaker 3: over the country. That means it's not the kid's fault.
Speaker 3: It's like this technology was designed to grip, to grab
Speaker 3: their attention, keep their interest, keep them thinking about it,
Speaker 3: send them alerts. Oh there's a special twenty percent off.
Speaker 3: Click here to find out what someone just said about you.
Speaker 1: When we come back. What our kids lose when they
Speaker 1: lose an analog childhood. If you want to get smarter
Speaker 1: every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating
Speaker 1: takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up
Speaker 1: for our daily newsletter Wake Up Call by going to
Speaker 1: Katiecuric dot com. We're back with Jonathan Hepe. I interviewed
Speaker 1: Christan Harris documentary I did six years ago on tech addiction,
Speaker 1: and you're right. I'm glad you brought that up, because
Speaker 1: in some ways it's not their fault because these devices
Speaker 1: are designed for maximum time spent on them, and so
Speaker 1: everything they can do, from making the colors enticing and
Speaker 1: interesting to making sure that they have constant stimulation, it's
Speaker 1: just it's very hard. It's hard. I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: addicted to my phone.
Speaker 3: Well, that's right. So I think one reason why my
Speaker 3: book is resonating so much, why people are buying it
Speaker 3: and sending and giving it to others, is that we've
Speaker 3: all seen this in ourselves. Like, you know, we know
Speaker 3: that this is true, that this stuff, it fragments our attention,
Speaker 3: it keeps us on, it wastes our time. Now, obviously
Speaker 3: there are very powerful tools. I mean for adults, there
Speaker 3: are reasons to use Instagram and even TikTok. You know,
Speaker 3: they're very helpful for companies.
Speaker 1: And markets and things like that.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, no one's addicted to maps. Kind of weird.
Speaker 1: If you're doing you're kind of addicted to maps. I
Speaker 1: am addicted to GPS. I don't think I could get
Speaker 1: any place with that.
Speaker 3: That's so you're dependent on it, which is very different.
Speaker 3: So look, adults can make a choice, you know what,
Speaker 3: I'm willing to give up my ability to navigate in
Speaker 3: return for perfect directions. And it's true, we are like
Speaker 3: I find like you know, I've been living in New
Speaker 3: York since twenty eleven. We have a grid system here.
Speaker 3: But yet, like I'm dependent on that. You know, you
Speaker 3: don't bother to learn certain things.
Speaker 1: I don't know my husband's phone number.
Speaker 3: Right, But okay, but again, that's not an addiction. That's
Speaker 3: you've been a change in your life, and it's a
Speaker 3: kind of a deal with the devil where you don't
Speaker 3: have to learn a lot of stuff because your computer
Speaker 3: knows it.
Speaker 1: But I feel like my mind is lazy as a result.
Speaker 1: But that's another topic. But getting back to addiction, I mean,
Speaker 1: so this is part of the problem, and I want
Speaker 1: to just bring in this notion of protecting children. This
Speaker 1: coincided with sort of stranger danger helicopter parenting. We don't
Speaker 1: want our kids to be too. So it's almost been
Speaker 1: a double whammy, hasn't it talk about that?
Speaker 3: So one thing that I do in the book. I
Speaker 3: thought that it was going to be a book about
Speaker 3: social media and girls, originally because that's where the data
Speaker 3: is clearest, that there's a cause, there's a causal relationship.
Speaker 3: But once I got all the numbers together, I started
Speaker 3: making graphs. My research partner, Zach Rousch, and I we
Speaker 3: had all these graphs. I asked him to look at
Speaker 3: what's happening all these countries and we saw it's not
Speaker 3: just us, it's so many countries. It's the boys too.
Speaker 3: Although the boys don't curve up quite as quickly. It's
Speaker 3: not like everything changed for them in twenty twelve the
Speaker 3: way it did for the girls. But the larger point
Speaker 3: is what we realized is it's a change in childhood.
Speaker 3: Where there's the first part is the loss of the
Speaker 3: play based childhood. And so I realized I can't just
Speaker 3: write a book about social media and girls. I have
Speaker 3: to actually start writing about what is childhood? What is
Speaker 3: human childhood? Why is it so different from every other species?
Speaker 3: Why is it so long? And why do humans actually
Speaker 3: slow down in our growth. Other primates they just grow
Speaker 3: and grow and grow, and then they reach puberty and
Speaker 3: then they reproduce. That's I mean, why wouldn't you But humans,
Speaker 3: we grow and grow and then we slow down around
Speaker 3: age three or four, were slow and we grow very
Speaker 3: slowly until around age you know, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
Speaker 3: and then we have a growth spurt. And that period
Speaker 3: seems to be an evolutionary adaptation for cultural learning. Humans
Speaker 3: have culture. Chimpanzees don't. They have a tiny bit, but
Speaker 3: not really much, And so there's so much learning to
Speaker 3: do in that period, and the way we learn is
Speaker 3: through play and through trial and error and when kids
Speaker 3: are out. You know, So did you play with fire
Speaker 3: when you were a kid? Is that a girl thing?
Speaker 3: Like boys? We all played with fire, I.
Speaker 1: Mean a little bit, not too much. But I wasn't
Speaker 1: too much of a pyro.
Speaker 3: Okay, we all were blue.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, I didn't sniff it. I just put it
Speaker 1: on my hands.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I hold it off, yes, the way I
Speaker 3: remember that feeling. Yes. Yeah, so we you know, we
Speaker 3: would build a you know, we stole lumber and built
Speaker 3: a little shack for ourselves in the you know, some
Speaker 3: trees behind my house. Yeah, but you know, there's attraction
Speaker 3: to fire. I mean, fire is a big part of
Speaker 3: evolutionary history. It's a real part of the human and
Speaker 3: stories fire And so you let kids play with fire,
Speaker 3: and they learn it, they master it, they feel comfortable
Speaker 3: with it. So that was a normal human childhood. And
Speaker 3: everyone got burned, Like at some point, you burn yourself,
Speaker 3: maybe burn yourself on the stove, maybe you burn yourself
Speaker 3: on a match, and then you learn from trial and error, Oh,
Speaker 3: be careful of the hot parts. That's the way humans
Speaker 3: have always learned, right.
Speaker 1: Or you're running around and you trip on something and
Speaker 1: you skin your knee, or you hurt yourself in other ways,
Speaker 1: and you kind of learn coordination and you know areas
Speaker 1: to stay away from all those kind of little lessons.
Speaker 3: That's exactly. So all of that comes about through trial
Speaker 3: and error. We have to have these experiences, we have
Speaker 3: to fall down, we have to have the setback, so
Speaker 3: we learn a lot from those. But what happened beginning
Speaker 3: in the eighties and especially in the nineties was Americans
Speaker 3: began to freak out about dangers to their children, the
Speaker 3: main danger being stranger danger kidnapping. Now, there's very little
Speaker 3: kidnapping in this country, thankfully. When it happens, it's mostly
Speaker 3: the non custodial parent. A true kidnapping by a stranger.
Speaker 3: FBI stats it's in the ballpark of one hundred a year,
Speaker 3: which in a gigantic country, that means you're much more
Speaker 3: likely be struck by lightning than that. But of course
Speaker 3: it looms large in your minds, and with cable TV,
Speaker 3: we all would then follow the few cases, so we
Speaker 3: had the feeling, and this is called the availability loss.
Speaker 1: For example, remember.
Speaker 3: That I don't remember that particular one.
Speaker 1: Yes, and then that led to three strikes anyway, Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, that's right, Megan's law. There are all kinds
Speaker 3: of laws, and anyway, I don't mean to minimize that
Speaker 3: particular issue, except to say it looms so large in
Speaker 3: the public mind that we began to think, if we
Speaker 3: let our kids out, someone's going to take them. And
Speaker 3: the previous assumption had been if we let our kids
Speaker 3: out in trouble, someone's going to help them, you know,
Speaker 3: like if I fell down on my bicycle and was
Speaker 3: you know, was actually injured, you know, like you could
Speaker 3: knock on the doorbell of the person, like, you know,
Speaker 3: can you call my mother, and they would call your mother.
Speaker 3: But in the eighties, for a lot of variety of
Speaker 3: sociological reasons, we lost trust in each other. We began
Speaker 3: to lose trust in each other. There were scandals, some
Speaker 3: of them were totally fake, like the daycare sex abuse
Speaker 3: scandals that never happened, but people were afraid, oh my god,
Speaker 3: even in daycare, my kids will be sexually molested. So
Speaker 3: once we became paranoid about other adults, that meant we
Speaker 3: had to do all the work ourselves, and that means
Speaker 3: especially mothers. So mothers were really judged by how well
Speaker 3: they were protecting their kids from dangers, and this intensifies
Speaker 3: in the nineties, which is the same decade that the
Speaker 3: Internet comes in, and now everyone's got a personal computer,
Speaker 3: and then you get an internet connection, and so you
Speaker 3: can either have your kids running around outside where you're
Speaker 3: afraid they'll be abducted, or they can sit inside on
Speaker 3: a computer, which will make them smarter. Right, So I'd
Speaker 3: much rather have them be sitting inside on a computer
Speaker 3: and where they're learning things. It's great, we had no
Speaker 3: idea what we were doing.
Speaker 1: Add to that this whole notion of helicopter parenting, right,
Speaker 1: it was almost taking it a notch further as parents
Speaker 1: started not only over protecting their children but kind of
Speaker 1: now it's called snowplow parenting, but doing things, you know,
Speaker 1: micromanaging their whole lives and giving them very little freedom
Speaker 1: to hopefully ensure their success whatever that might mean.
Speaker 3: That's right, which is paradoxical, because if you want your
Speaker 3: kid to be successful in life, the last thing you
Speaker 3: should do is make them successful at everything they try.
Speaker 3: You need to let them struggle. Kids. As I said before,
Speaker 3: we learned from trial and error. We learn a lot
Speaker 3: more from our failures and mistakes than from our successes.
Speaker 3: So they have to have those failures. We are anti fragile.
Speaker 3: That means if you treat your kid as that they're fragile,
Speaker 3: and you say, oh my god, if someone teases my child,
Speaker 3: they'll be hurt. If someone excludes my child, she'll be hurt. Like, no,
Speaker 3: your kid needs to be excluded, sometimes not too much,
Speaker 3: but kids need all the negatives. Then they realize I
Speaker 3: can survive this.
Speaker 1: Right, here's what develop coping mechan That's right exactly. I
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about the mental health repercussions
Speaker 1: of this period of time between twenty ten and twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: because that I think is sort of the siren call
Speaker 1: of this book and something that is really very disturbing
Speaker 1: and upsetting. Can you talk about the things that have
Speaker 1: increased as a result you believe of this constant well,
Speaker 1: this addiction to your iPhone?
Speaker 3: Yeah sure so. So first, the way to understand it
Speaker 3: is not any one thing. It's not like just social
Speaker 3: media or just video games. It's the transition from what
Speaker 3: I've called a play based childhood, where plays you know,
Speaker 3: you're out hanging out with your friends, that's the normal
Speaker 3: thing you do, to a phone based childhood where most
Speaker 3: stuff is coming through the screen, So it's that transition.
Speaker 3: So what does it do. The things that go up
Speaker 3: a lot are especially it's not all mental disorders, it's
Speaker 3: especially those related to anxiety and depression. Those are the
Speaker 3: core mental illnesses that have increased dramatically. So you know
Speaker 3: between fifteen, one hundred and fifty percent, depending on what
Speaker 3: measure and what age group you're talking about, the most dramatic.
Speaker 3: So some of my critics say, oh, you know, that's
Speaker 3: just self report, Like girls are saying they're depressed because
Speaker 3: you know, the stigma is reduced, and that's a good
Speaker 3: thing that they're just reporting and more. But the kids
Speaker 3: are all right, there's no change, there's nothing going on here.
Speaker 3: It's just another moral pen This is the main pushback
Speaker 3: I get to my book, to which I say, it's
Speaker 3: a plausible hypothesis. You know, there are definitely changes in
Speaker 3: diagnostic criteria over time that could be it. So let's
Speaker 3: look at some things that don't involve self report, that
Speaker 3: don't involve asking kids questions about how do you feel today.
Speaker 3: Let's look at hospitalizations or emergency room visits for self harm.
Speaker 3: Intentional self harm, which is a thing that girls have
Speaker 3: always done much more than boys. When they hit puberty,
Speaker 3: girls become more depressed and anxious than boys. They rise
Speaker 3: up on that. That's always been the case and one
Speaker 3: way of dealing with anxiety. It's hard for people to understand.
Speaker 3: Cutting yourself is not a suicide attempt. It's a thing
Speaker 3: that many teenage girls do. It's somehow it manages their anxiety,
Speaker 3: but it's terrifying. I mean to see your child bloody
Speaker 3: from her own hand. And these numbers go up like
Speaker 3: fifty to eighty percent for the older teen girls, one
Speaker 3: hundred and eighty percent for the younger teen girls. The
Speaker 3: CDC breaks up the data the ten to fourteen year olds.
Speaker 3: Whenever you look at the ten to fourteen year old girls,
Speaker 3: you see gigantic increases, more than doubling, sometimes almost tripling.
Speaker 3: So that's one of the most alarming things. And that
Speaker 3: the same thing happened in Canada, in Britain, in Australia
Speaker 3: and New Zealand and a lot of other countries. That
Speaker 3: all happened, that all began to go up in the
Speaker 3: early twenty ten. So something is really happening, especially to
Speaker 3: girls in that period.
Speaker 1: Not only self harm, but let's talk about suicides. Because
Speaker 1: that is also really really scary. I know that Vivig Murphy,
Speaker 1: who's a surgeon general, who was also the surgeon General
Speaker 1: during the Obama administration, issued and advisory talk about suicide
Speaker 1: rates and suicidal ideation.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sure, So suicide is actually going down around the
Speaker 3: world since the year two thousand ers. So there's been
Speaker 3: a global decline in suicide. The number of reasons for that,
Speaker 3: nobody really knows why, but it's been going down overall.
Speaker 3: And some people say, oh, see, this disproves your thesis
Speaker 3: is because you know, as smartphones were coming in, the
Speaker 3: suicide rate is going down, so it can't be the
Speaker 3: smartphones are bad. But when you break out the suicide
Speaker 3: stats by age and sex, what you see is is
Speaker 3: going down for everybody except for teenage girls and teenage boys.
Speaker 3: Teenage boys are up, are up more recently, but teenage
Speaker 3: girls all around the world, or at least in the
Speaker 3: western world, I should in the developed world, they begin
Speaker 3: going up in the mid early to mid twenty tens.
Speaker 1: The statistics you report in the book about anxiety, depressions, suicide,
Speaker 1: self harm, et cetera. Are really staggering and very upsetting.
Speaker 1: They have been publicized by the Surgeon General's Office. Rates
Speaker 1: of depression and anxiety in the US rose by more
Speaker 1: than fifty percent from twenty ten to twenty nineteen. The
Speaker 1: suicide rate rose forty eight percent for adolescence between the
Speaker 1: ages of ten and nineteen, and for girls ages ten
Speaker 1: to fourteen, the suicide rate rows one hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: one percent.
Speaker 3: That's right. Whenever you look at the younger teen girls,
Speaker 3: you see astonishing increases, and it's very sharp. It wasn't
Speaker 3: like they they just gradually went up. There's actually, I
Speaker 3: think a fifty percent increase between twenty twelve and twenty thirteen.
Speaker 3: In that single year, there's a fifty percent increase, and
Speaker 3: then the rage just keeps going up from there. So
Speaker 3: that I think is also very clear evidence that something
Speaker 3: changed in the early twenty tens. Now, I should also
Speaker 3: make clear we've been focusing on the girls. Boys have
Speaker 3: much higher rates of suicide than girls do. Boys are
Speaker 3: much more risk of suicide. Girls make more attempts. Girls
Speaker 3: say they think about suicide more often. In fact, now
Speaker 3: I think it's thirty percent of American girls say they've
Speaker 3: made a suicide planner, They've thought seriously about suicide. In
Speaker 3: the last year it used to be I think it
Speaker 3: was nineteen percent in twenty ten something like that, so
Speaker 3: it's way up. But girls, when they make attempts, they
Speaker 3: tend to use reversible means, either cutting their wrists or
Speaker 3: taking their psychiatric medications and overdose of them something like that.
Speaker 3: Boys make fewer attempts, but when boys make attempts, they
Speaker 3: tend to use a gun or a tall building, and
Speaker 3: so boys attempts tend to be not reversible, and so
Speaker 3: that's why they end up with two or three times
Speaker 3: the rate of actual suicide. So we have to really
Speaker 3: attend to boys as well. But it's not linked to
Speaker 3: social media as clearly as it is for the girls.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about what specifically you know, because there's
Speaker 1: a lot of things on your iPhone. There's social media,
Speaker 1: they're also group chats, they're all kinds of things. There
Speaker 1: are things that are being sent to you. If you
Speaker 1: google something about eating disorders, you might get all sorts
Speaker 1: of content. Is there anything specific that you were able
Speaker 1: to parse out that seems to be behind these numbers?
Speaker 3: Well, so for suicide, it's very hard to say because
Speaker 3: suicide is still so rare, thankfully, so we don't really
Speaker 3: have studies saying, you know, before she killed herself, she
Speaker 3: did this and that's right, So we don't tend to
Speaker 3: have that data. What I suspect is happening is it's
Speaker 3: incredibly painful to be publicly shamed. It's incredibly painful to
Speaker 3: be exclus alluded, to be a pariah. That's social death,
Speaker 3: and the being on social media makes it possible to
Speaker 3: be shamed at a magnitude far beyond what we could
Speaker 3: ever have imagined when we were young. So you might
Speaker 3: say something, you make a bad joke.
Speaker 1: Is it like virtual bullying?
Speaker 3: Yes, it's because the mob dynamics of social media are
Speaker 3: such that it used to be if you said something
Speaker 3: stupid or to your friend, your acquaintance group, and someone
Speaker 3: was offended, they might spread rumors about you, and that
Speaker 3: would painful to learn, but it wouldn't be the entire school,
Speaker 3: and they wouldn't all be adding on and laughing at
Speaker 3: you in a way that you can see. Things were
Speaker 3: little back then. But with social media there's no limit
Speaker 3: to how big it can get, and so it could
Speaker 3: even go national with this stupid thing you said, or
Speaker 3: it could go national. It's with you for the rest
Speaker 3: of your life and when it's happening. In those first
Speaker 3: days when something is going viral, we have these innate
Speaker 3: social psychological mechanism that are always monitoring our reputation. How
Speaker 3: am I doing? How am I doing? What do people
Speaker 3: think of me? And especially if you're in an early teen,
Speaker 3: you're so insecure about it, and.
Speaker 1: So you're just developing your sense of self.
Speaker 3: That's right. You know, you were in fifth grade a
Speaker 3: couple of years ago, and it was fun. You were
Speaker 3: playing with toys.
Speaker 1: And also your hormones or rating your body.
Speaker 3: Your body's changing, that's right. That's right, which is another
Speaker 3: reason it's hardest for girls because their bodies change more
Speaker 3: visibly in ways that the public, that other people respond to.
Speaker 1: And also the fact that so many girls post pictures
Speaker 1: of themselves and bikinis, and then that results in a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, eating disorders and feeling insecure about
Speaker 1: unattainable beauty standards.
Speaker 3: Exactly. That's right. So you know, when you and I
Speaker 3: were growing up, there's a lot of talk about, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, all these models and the magazines. It's really
Speaker 3: bad for our girls. They shouldn't be seeing these super
Speaker 3: thin models. And everyone's saying this is beauty, And yeah,
Speaker 3: that was right. That was hard for girls. Well just
Speaker 3: think how much harder it is when it's not some
Speaker 3: strange adult in a magazine. It's literally all the people
Speaker 3: you know posting photos in which they look more beautiful
Speaker 3: than they do in real life. And you might even
Speaker 3: know they're using filters, but unconsciously your brain is saying,
Speaker 3: she's more beautiful than me, her life is more perfect
Speaker 3: than me. Why don't I have a car like Why
Speaker 3: doesn't my family have a car like that? So so,
Speaker 3: for all these reasons, spending a lot of time on
Speaker 3: Instagram in particular, it just really fosters a lot of
Speaker 3: social comparison, which is hard for all kids, but especially
Speaker 3: for the younger teen girls. So why I'm just so
Speaker 3: adamant we really have to get this all out of
Speaker 3: middle school. Just don't try to make it nicer, don't
Speaker 3: try to filter things and remove the eating disorder content.
Speaker 3: Just keep them the hell off. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk to you about solutions in a moment,
Speaker 1: but I want to tell you this terrible story I
Speaker 1: heard this morning when I was taking a walk with
Speaker 1: the friend. She had read this story, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to find it to verify it that a young man
Speaker 1: in Michigan his phone got hacked. He was sent this
Speaker 1: very seductive picture. Do you know this story?
Speaker 3: No, but this is a six story story.
Speaker 1: I go ahead, and this woman, I guess, said, you
Speaker 1: know I really like you or I mean just I
Speaker 1: don't know, and send me a nude photo of yourself.
Speaker 1: The young man did, and then they were told that
Speaker 1: we were going to blackmail you. Send five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Now send another five hundred. This is, you know, like
Speaker 1: eleventh grader. Finally, he said, we know everything about you.
Speaker 1: We know your family, we know your siblings, we know
Speaker 1: all of this information. We are going to destroy your life.
Speaker 3: That suicide.
Speaker 1: He killed himself. This was like the captain of the
Speaker 1: football team, a kid everyone loved, from a nice family.
Speaker 1: And it was so sick and so upsetting. And I
Speaker 1: guess the FBI traced it to some Nigerian scam, but
Speaker 1: that is so terrible.
Speaker 3: These are the most and I've got some stories that
Speaker 3: are even more horrible than that. But we don't know
Speaker 3: how many this is happening to. But this is not
Speaker 3: just like this thing happened to one kid. This has happened.
Speaker 3: I don't know how many. But this is happening to
Speaker 3: a bunch of kids. So this boy was not depressed.
Speaker 3: This is not like, oh he was depressed and killed himself. No, No,
Speaker 3: he was driven by fear and shame and horror into
Speaker 3: killing himself and.
Speaker 1: Then they started harassing his girlfriend.
Speaker 3: So what I want parents to think about here is,
Speaker 3: of course, we don't want our kids hanging out with
Speaker 3: creeps that might sexually molest them. We don't want them
Speaker 3: to go out into the world where where such things
Speaker 3: can happen to them. But guess what, the creeps and
Speaker 3: predators are not at your child's playground. They're on Instagram.
Speaker 3: That's literally where they're hanging out because that's how they
Speaker 3: can get to young girls, especially, and they can ask
Speaker 3: for photos and they can pretend to be somebody they're not. So,
Speaker 3: you know, I can summarize my whole book by saying,
Speaker 3: we have overprotected our children in the real world, we
Speaker 3: have underprotected them online. And the fact that some number
Speaker 3: of kids, you know, is it hundreds, Is it that
Speaker 3: since I don't know, get sex storted. I mean, this
Speaker 3: is a thing now and now it's so profitable. There
Speaker 3: are sextortion rings all around the world that are praying
Speaker 3: on children. Why would you let your child do something
Speaker 3: where strangers with bad intent can get to them?
Speaker 1: After the break some good news? Why Jonathan thinks we're
Speaker 1: at a tipping point where everyone is starting to not
Speaker 1: only talk about this but take action. Now more of
Speaker 1: my conversation with the one and only Jonathan Height. I
Speaker 1: know that you've been to Capitol Hill and this conversation
Speaker 1: has been going on a long time, but nothing seems
Speaker 1: to get done. Do you feel like we're at a
Speaker 1: tipping points, both by American parents and adults and also
Speaker 1: by our leaders in Congress? And if so, what do
Speaker 1: you say see them doing? Because it's frustrating that more
Speaker 1: hasn't been done already.
Speaker 3: That's right. I am certain we are at a tipping point.
Speaker 3: And here's how I know. Before COVID, when I was
Speaker 3: really began working on this, there was some ambiguity as
Speaker 3: to what was the cause. We didn't know what to.
Speaker 1: Do itation versus correlation, That's right.
Speaker 3: And then you know in gene Tweengie and I were
Speaker 3: sort of trying to demonstrate, look, there's actually a lot
Speaker 3: of evidence of causation, and then COVID comes in confuses
Speaker 3: everybody changes everything. Of course, our kids are spending all
Speaker 3: day on screens now, and then when COVID fades away
Speaker 3: and our kids are going back to school, there's still
Speaker 3: really the depression and anxiety rates are still extremely high.
Speaker 3: They're not really going down. So now it's clear, and
Speaker 3: now everyone has seen it. Everyone is seen more about
Speaker 3: what happens when their kids are online all day. So
Speaker 3: there's an emerging sense among parents that this is just
Speaker 3: really bad for our kids. And it's totally bipartisan. So
Speaker 3: here's why I'm confident that things are going to change
Speaker 3: in our incredibly divided country where our Congress can't really
Speaker 3: do anything because if one side likes it, the other
Speaker 3: sides against it. Right, everyone just about sees the problem.
Speaker 3: Most legislators are parents, Most of our congress people are parents.
Speaker 3: And what I went down I was giving some talks
Speaker 3: in Washington. I met with some members of Congress and
Speaker 3: the group I met with a volunteer to come. It
Speaker 3: was half Democrats, half Republicans. There are a couple of
Speaker 3: bills that I think have a really good chance of passages.
Speaker 3: The main one is COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act,
Speaker 3: which requires the companies to assume a duty of care.
Speaker 3: That is, they have to realize children are not adults.
Speaker 3: You can't do the dirty tricks you do on adults.
Speaker 3: You can't do those to kids. You have to give
Speaker 3: them more private you can't make them discover by strangers.
Speaker 3: So cosa I'm really hopeful that really could pass this year.
Speaker 3: The big thing that we need to protect kids is
Speaker 3: to raise the age from thirteen to sixteen. Congress set
Speaker 3: a law in nineteen ninety eight that said you have
Speaker 3: to be thirteen years old in order to sign a
Speaker 3: contract with a company like AOL or whatever.
Speaker 1: You get around that. Though, well, hold, wait.
Speaker 3: Hold on. The law says, at what age can a
Speaker 3: company just take your day without your parents even knowing
Speaker 3: about it? Or And what Congress said was, as long
Speaker 3: as you're thirteen, will treat you like an adult, and
Speaker 3: you can make deals with companies without even your parents
Speaker 3: knowing or giving permission. But oh, by the way, the
Speaker 3: lobbyists god is to gut the enforcement procedures. So as
Speaker 3: long as the company doesn't know for sure that you're
Speaker 3: under thirteen, they're okay. So as long as you say
Speaker 3: you're thirteen, you can't sue the company for what they do, right,
Speaker 3: So that's a terrible law in nineteen ninety eight, and
Speaker 3: that was the last law Congress ever passed to protect
Speaker 3: children or regulate the en It was complete failure, and
Speaker 3: there's been zero since then. I think they realize it now.
Speaker 3: And here's why I think it's going to change, because
Speaker 3: politicians are very good at sensing when there is a
Speaker 3: groundswell of public support. They want to be ahead of that,
Speaker 3: not behind it. And so this is why I think
Speaker 3: we're seeing a lot of action in the states, a
Speaker 3: lot of state governors.
Speaker 1: In Florida, Fia state you can't sign up for social
Speaker 1: media until.
Speaker 3: Till you're sixteen. Until you're sixteen, but with parents. So
Speaker 3: that was original bills until you're sixteen, which is what
Speaker 3: I'm advocating. But in Florida they in the lobbying and
Speaker 3: they put in provision if you're fourteen or fifteen, you
Speaker 3: can do it if you have your parents' permission. And
Speaker 3: I'm okay with that because that will force the companies
Speaker 3: to develop a way of getting parental permission, which they
Speaker 3: don't want to do. But come on, we have to
Speaker 3: One objection I get is, oh, the government shouldn't be
Speaker 3: involved in this. It should be up to the parents
Speaker 3: how they raise their kids. Yeah, but we can't control
Speaker 3: it unless we lock our kids up and never let
Speaker 3: them get near a web browser. Putting a requirement for
Speaker 3: parental permission in the law will motivate the companies to
Speaker 3: figure out how to do it, and then finally we
Speaker 3: parents will have more tools to actually raise our kids
Speaker 3: the way we want to.
Speaker 1: And it's all about sort of working with other parents,
Speaker 1: which I think is absolutely the key. And you have
Speaker 1: recommendations for how we solve or maybe rewire our kids' brains.
Speaker 1: Again back to I don't know, is it a lost
Speaker 1: cause at some point?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, it's two different things. One is how do
Speaker 3: we prevent jen alpha, which is let's say born after
Speaker 3: twenty eleven ch Yeah, that you know, because they know
Speaker 3: gen Z. You go back to alpha.
Speaker 1: At the beginning, Whaney said, it was like, wasn't it
Speaker 1: like polars?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we'll see what name sticks, right, We
Speaker 3: don't know yet. Yeah, but let's suppose it's going to
Speaker 3: be jin alpha. So the most important thing is to
Speaker 3: just stop them from getting sucked into this vortex that
Speaker 3: it consumed gen Z. The next thing is, well, when
Speaker 3: we do to help the kids were born between nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety six and twenty eleven. And so what I'm proposing
Speaker 3: is four norms, which are hard to do if you're
Speaker 3: acting on your own, but if a group of parents,
Speaker 3: or especially if a community around a school does it,
Speaker 3: they're actually easy to do. So here they are. One,
Speaker 3: no smartphone before high school. Give kids a flip phone,
Speaker 3: a phone, watch, or nothing, but delay smartphones until high school.
Speaker 3: Two is no social media until sixteen. There's really no
Speaker 3: way these things are unsafe at any speed for kids
Speaker 3: going through puberty. Let them get through early puberty. The
Speaker 3: third is phone free schools. Just put this. Put the
Speaker 3: phones in a locker or a yonder pouch first thing
Speaker 3: in the morning. I mean a special phone locker, not
Speaker 3: your own personal locker. They have to be taken away
Speaker 3: so that at lunch and between classes kids are talking
Speaker 3: to each other they're not all looking at their phones.
Speaker 1: My husband said, why can't there be a phone that
Speaker 1: could be put on school mode. You know, we talked
Speaker 1: about school shooting, so could there be something that says
Speaker 1: it's only available to text to you know, your parents. Yes,
Speaker 1: that would be John said, he's not an engineer, but
Speaker 1: he thinks that's a good idea.
Speaker 3: I know some people have advocated that Apple created school Mode.
Speaker 3: It's better than nothing. But still, the idea is you
Speaker 3: can be text with your parents all day long.
Speaker 1: No, no, but if there's a school shooting or there's
Speaker 1: something bad happens, I know that that's unlikely. But as
Speaker 1: you and I have discussed before, that's one reason parents
Speaker 1: really worry about not having their kids with a phone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I understand that. But but the experts on
Speaker 3: school safety say is that you're much better off in
Speaker 3: a school where the adults have a phone and the
Speaker 3: kids are listening and following directions and they're quiet and
Speaker 3: they're doing what they're supposed to do, rather than a
Speaker 3: school and which as soon as there's a problem, everyone's
Speaker 3: on their phone crying to their parents. That's just not
Speaker 3: an effective way to deal with the school shooting.
Speaker 1: And finally, it's more independence, free play, and responsibility in
Speaker 1: the real world.
Speaker 3: That's right, So this is really important. Discussion tends to
Speaker 3: focus on the phones because that's what we're all upset about.
Speaker 3: But if we're going to roll back the phone based
Speaker 3: childhood so that our kids are not spending the latest
Speaker 3: numbers are nine or ten hours a day on average
Speaker 3: of leisure time on screens and phones. If we're going
Speaker 3: to roll that back and cut that way down, we
Speaker 3: have to give them back a positive childhood, the kind
Speaker 3: of childhood that we had and their grandparents and great grandparents,
Speaker 3: which has a lot of play, a lot of hanging out,
Speaker 3: a lot of independence. So we have to do both.
Speaker 3: We have to roll back the phone based childhood. We
Speaker 3: have to restore the play based childhood.
Speaker 1: You have a lot of hope, but are we at
Speaker 1: the point of no return? Are people and society in
Speaker 1: general so addicted to their digital devices the genie is
Speaker 1: out of the bottle. I mean, I hope that's not true,
Speaker 1: But I just wonder how realistic you're being.
Speaker 3: So let's use a different meta or another one. I
Speaker 3: hear is you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube,
Speaker 3: to which I say, if your children's life depended on
Speaker 3: you getting toothpaste back in a tube, you'd figure out
Speaker 3: a way. You know that train has left the station.
Speaker 3: If the train left the station, it was loaded with
Speaker 3: our kids and was headed for a bridge that was out,
Speaker 3: and we knew they were all going to plunge to
Speaker 3: their death. We'd probably call it back. So, yeah, it's
Speaker 3: going to be hard getting rid of all the chromebooks
Speaker 3: and iPads and all the things in school that they
Speaker 3: use to text. That's going to be really hard. But
Speaker 3: all of that is doable. But let's start with the
Speaker 3: phone to.
Speaker 1: Do that though, I mean, if it's not attached to social.
Speaker 3: Media, but a lot of it is, a lot of
Speaker 3: it is, well.
Speaker 1: Just don't attach it to social medium. Makes it technology
Speaker 1: that's built for learning.
Speaker 3: Yes, So I do think if because I had this
Speaker 3: discussion in Washington with a policy expert who was saying
Speaker 3: con Academy is so great that the teacher can assign
Speaker 3: and the con Academy has you know, AI intelligent, that's
Speaker 3: all great. So I said, you know what if you
Speaker 3: could have like an iPad or a special device that
Speaker 3: only did con academy that is all, and you could
Speaker 3: have that on your desk, that I think would probably
Speaker 3: be positive. But as long as it's a multifunction device
Speaker 3: that has twenty three things the kid can do, the
Speaker 3: distraction effects are going to swamp whatever educational benefits. If
Speaker 3: we talk again next year, we'll talk about the ed
Speaker 3: tech because I'm just learning about that let's start with
Speaker 3: the phones, because that is the child's personal portal to
Speaker 3: the entire internet. That is the way that strangers can
Speaker 3: get to your child, companies can get to your child.
Speaker 3: So let's just delay that till high school minimum.
Speaker 1: Which would be great if their parents could stop using
Speaker 1: the phone. And I want to ask you about parental
Speaker 1: modeling because John Downs, who was at a book event
Speaker 1: for you last night, we walked out together and he said,
Speaker 1: I really wanted to ask Jonathan this question. He's the
Speaker 1: headmaster at the Millbrook School, and he said, what about parents.
Speaker 1: Kids see their parents constantly on their phones. I worry
Speaker 1: that there's less and less interaction with children and their parents.
Speaker 1: You see go the playground, you see all the parents
Speaker 1: or the babysitters on phones. You see people pushing strong
Speaker 1: instead of pointing out things for their kids to look at,
Speaker 1: they're on their phone. So JO parents have some responsibility
Speaker 1: before they start.
Speaker 3: They do they do, especially for infants and toddlers who
Speaker 3: are They're trying their brains are trying to figure out
Speaker 3: how do I do this interaction thing and turn taking
Speaker 3: and timing and making jokes. And so I would urge
Speaker 3: parents of young children to avoid what's called continuous partial attention.
Speaker 3: It's where you're kind of aware what your kid is doing,
Speaker 3: but you're also trying to do your email and text
Speaker 3: and you're doing a bad job of both.
Speaker 1: That's such a bad signal to kids about what's important.
Speaker 1: And you know, sometimes I have friends who children have
Speaker 1: been desperate in saying, Mom, get off the phone, get
Speaker 1: off the phone. And you know it's really hard.
Speaker 3: Yeah it is. But the one thing I want to
Speaker 3: point out here is because I get this question a lot,
Speaker 3: like aren't the kids just copying us? And I think
Speaker 3: the answer is no. If you think about an eleven
Speaker 3: or twelve year old kid and her her parents are
Speaker 3: on their phone all the time, and her friends aren't
Speaker 3: on phones. They're out playing, which is going to be
Speaker 3: more influential. Kids are much more focused on what their
Speaker 3: friends are doing.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Conversely, you have a kid all her friends are on
Speaker 3: their phones all the time, they're all on Instagram, and
Speaker 3: you have parents who are perfect models of digital maturity
Speaker 3: and they use their phone really in healthy ways. What's
Speaker 3: the kid going to do uninfluenced by the parents, They're
Speaker 3: going to do whatever the other kids are doing. So
Speaker 3: our parental behavior is extremely important.
Speaker 1: For instance, karents do still Ellen Golinsky, who I'm sure
Speaker 1: you know, just wrote a book and she still talks
Speaker 1: about how hugely important influential parents are in their children's behavior.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, I mean, of course parents are influential. But
Speaker 3: the simple idea that our kids are copying us is
Speaker 3: there's some truth to it when they're very young, but
Speaker 3: we don't have that kind of direct influence. They're much
Speaker 3: more concerned about their peers are doing. And what I
Speaker 3: just said is far more true after twenty ten. When
Speaker 3: you hook kids up by social media, there's just not
Speaker 3: much room in their input stream for their parents.
Speaker 1: So if you want to get your kids off their
Speaker 1: phone or delay giving them a phone, you really have
Speaker 1: to reach out to your parental community. Yes, and almost
Speaker 1: sign a pledge, right and kind of say, this is
Speaker 1: how we're going to operate. Is everyone with us, and
Speaker 1: you present the information and the evidence that not doing
Speaker 1: that could have really dangerous consequences.
Speaker 3: That's right. The key is cooperation. We're all stuck in
Speaker 3: a collective action problem. If we do it together, it
Speaker 3: becomes easy. And so, for example, there's a really great
Speaker 3: organization called Wait until Eighth, which eighth grade. That's right,
Speaker 3: in which parents sign a pledge when the kids are
Speaker 3: in first or second grade, and then once fifty people
Speaker 3: I think it is in that school or that grade agree,
Speaker 3: the pledge becomes live and now you have a support group.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: The only problem is eighth grade is too early. Eighth
Speaker 3: grade is actually still in middle school, and I'm adamant
Speaker 3: we have to get this all out in middle school.
Speaker 3: So the people wait until eight They've actually changed it.
Speaker 3: It's wait until the end of eighth So you know,
Speaker 3: we're all.
Speaker 1: Maybe they should say wait until tenth. But by the way,
Speaker 1: I think high school is held to So I mean,
Speaker 1: puberty is awful, but high school can be helped.
Speaker 3: Oh, no, it absolutely is. Look, if we were just
Speaker 3: doing this for health, I would say wait till eighteen.
Speaker 3: Like kids should not be on you know, they should
Speaker 3: certainly not be on social media. And in Europe, where
Speaker 3: they don't have this, we have this break in America
Speaker 3: mostly between eighth and ninth grade. And because I'm a
Speaker 3: social psychologist, I'm not focused on the child's age. I'm
Speaker 3: focused on the community. And a middle school can do
Speaker 3: things a high school. They're also dependent on the phones.
Speaker 3: They assume every kid has a phone. It's going to
Speaker 3: be very hard to get the phones out of the
Speaker 3: lives of high school kids, but middle school we can do.
Speaker 3: So that's why I'm so focused on that.
Speaker 1: Why do Europeans seem to be take this much more
Speaker 1: seriously than Americans? Because hasn't there been legislation and all
Speaker 1: kinds of actions.
Speaker 3: So in Europe they have a very different idea about regulation.
Speaker 3: In the EU, they love regulation. They think it's appropriate
Speaker 3: for the government to determine all sorts of things. In America,
Speaker 3: we have a much more libertarian streak. We think, especially
Speaker 3: the federal government. You know, the Tenth Amendment says here's
Speaker 3: what the federal government can do. Everything else is up
Speaker 3: to the states. And in Britain it's in between. I
Speaker 3: just in fact, I was just talking with some British
Speaker 3: people today. In Britain, they are trying to pass a
Speaker 3: law that says that you can't buy a smartphone until
Speaker 3: you are sixteen. Now, that doesn't make any sense. In America,
Speaker 3: We're not going to have the government saying what you
Speaker 3: can and can't buy in terms of a product.
Speaker 1: Well, we do for cigarettes and alcohol.
Speaker 3: But right because those those are more directly linked to illnesses.
Speaker 3: What I'm saying is in Europe they have different ideas
Speaker 3: about government than we do. And often I think that's
Speaker 3: been good. I think we have a more vibrant economy
Speaker 3: because of that. But there are times, as with gun
Speaker 3: control and assault rifles and now sports gambling, there's all
Speaker 3: sorts of hazards for kids. I think our government does
Speaker 3: need to be more active.
Speaker 1: And a selfish question to end this conversation with, As
Speaker 1: you might know, Jonathan, or maybe you don't, I recently
Speaker 1: became a grandmother. My daughter Ellie has a little boy
Speaker 1: who is about a month old. So what would you
Speaker 1: advise Ellie and her husband Mark in terms of using
Speaker 1: the phone. You know, when they hold little Jay, they're
Speaker 1: reading their phones, they're looking at articles, they're taking pictures
Speaker 1: of him, and I think, oh my god, he's going
Speaker 1: to get as used to the phone being around his
Speaker 1: face as he is. Ellie and Mark, Yeah.
Speaker 3: That's right. The urge to take pictures of your kids
Speaker 3: all the time is so strong. I'm not saying don't
Speaker 3: take pictures, but just recognize. What I would advise for
Speaker 3: them is aim for more analog childhood. Find some other
Speaker 3: families as he gets older, find some other families that
Speaker 3: agree with you. We're at a tipping point. It might
Speaker 3: have been hard to find those families five years ago.
Speaker 3: In two or three years, most families are going to
Speaker 3: be this way. So find other families. Try to find
Speaker 3: ways for the kids to get together, to just be
Speaker 3: around each other, and some toys. Toys can be a
Speaker 3: couple of cardboard boxes. The kids will find something to
Speaker 3: do with it and it'll be fun. So they're in
Speaker 3: great shape. Things are going to get a lot lot
Speaker 3: better over the coming years because almost everyone is fed up.
Speaker 3: Almost everyone is ready for change, and so if we
Speaker 3: do this together, it's going to change.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Height, I always love talking to you. The book
Speaker 1: is The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood
Speaker 1: is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Let's hope you're
Speaker 1: right that we're at a real tipping point, because you
Speaker 1: know so many lives depend on that.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: Thanks Katie, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: Special. Thanks to Kate McLoughlin for interviewing those young people
Speaker 1: for today's episode. Thanks for listening everyone. If you have
Speaker 1: a question for me, a subject you want us to cover,
Speaker 1: or you want to share your thoughts about how you
Speaker 1: navigate this crazy world reach out. You can leave a
Speaker 1: short message at six h nine five point two five
Speaker 1: to five oh five, or you can send me a
Speaker 1: DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media.
Speaker 1: The executive producers are Me, Katiekuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our
Speaker 1: supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana
Speaker 1: Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music.
Speaker 1: For more information about today's episode, or to sign up
Speaker 1: for my newsletter wake Up Call, go to the description
Speaker 1: in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com.
Speaker 1: You can also find me on Instagram and all my
Speaker 1: social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.